I am going to a job interview at the campus library. Climb the brick stairs and broad be-fountained landings to the white building.
Inside high metal shelves with rivets showing, banks of microfilm drawers, map cases. Smell of graphite on their runners. I spent college working at the periodicals desk but those shelves and drawers were smaller. I have not changed size but I feel like the kid in the grownup part of the library, or a grownup in the great people's places. No one can find the librarian. I wander around -- periodicals in vinyl bindings, smell of red rot. I never find her.
The library turns out to be in Iceland. I go home with -- who? an aunt? We go to the restuarant. A cement patio with low walls above a black, ice-strewn sea. It's night. Plumes of breath. The restuarant has a glass dome. Inside of dark wood, candles, white linen tableclothes. An inlet of the sea smokes with cold. The dome is opaque with frost. Through little gaps are fine, faint stars. I find part of the dipper, find North.
Later I walk down the steps of the restuarant and edge, flow by flow, out onto the cold, calm sea.
To me this sounds like leaving the known and ill-fitting behind and going out into something larger. The ice floes are like stepping stones into the unknown.
You think? That's much nicer than my thought that I'm never gonna get a job I like and possibly will die a cold lonely death.
You already have a job you like. It's called writing.
Good to see you writing again. I've missed you!